Scheuer was the CIA’s first point man on Bin Laden in the 1990s, and his new biography is based on years of following the Saudi terror mastermind in and outside of the agency. His Bin Laden is a man motivated not by hatred of American values or obsessed with our freedoms, sexual or political, but by deep anger at American policies. It is not about whether we vote or what we wear but about what Bin Laden believes we have done to the Islamic world, the ummah, over the last century. The Crusaders, as Bin Laden calls us, have pillaged the ummah for decades. Above all the other “crimes” Bin Laden rails against is American support for the creation of Israel and for supporting it ever since.

Bergen, who is one of the few Westerners to have met Bin Laden face to face, and who interviewed dozens of his close followers for this book, comes to the same conclusion. Bin Laden grew up in a household where his father, a multibillionaire construction magnate, was in charge of remodeling the three holiest mosques of Islam—in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The family would fly to each to pray at all three in one day sometimes. Defense of Islam was a family duty. For the young Bin Laden, the Palestinian cause was a centerpiece of life from youth. He named one of his daughters Safia, after a girl “who killed a Jewish spy.”

For al-Qaida Israel is the root of all evil, Bergen’s book reports. The Jewish state is the Crusader’s key ally in suppressing the ummah and is used to keep the Muslim world divided and weak. It literally separates the ummah into African and Asian parts. It prevents the Muslim world from developing nuclear weapons by bombing its reactors in Iraq, Syria, and maybe Iran to protect its own monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region. The United States provides it with $3 billion in aid each year, the latest high-performance weapons, and diplomatic protection. The answer to the Crusader-Zionist alliance must be jihad until America is driven out of the ummah for good, just as the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. Then the traitorous regimes in Cairo, Riyadh, and elsewhere will be overthrown, and Israel will be driven into the sea and destroyed forever.

Thus Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri started his career in terror with a plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel, Bergen notes. When the two declared war on America in 1998, they set as their top goal to “liberate” Jerusalem from “the petty Jewish state.” The Sept. 11 Commission concluded the mastermind of the attacks, Khaled Shaykh Muhammad, was motivated by “his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” In 2008, Bin Laden made it crystal clear “the Palestine issue is my central issue. It is why the incidents of September 11th took place.” After the failed 2009 Christmas attack on a Detroit-bound plane, Bin Laden said more attacks would come until America stops supporting Israel.

***

Scheuer and Bergen agree that the intellectual mastermind who shaped Bin Laden and al-Qaida’s worldview more than any other was the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam. He was born near the West Bank town of Jenin, and his family fled to the Jordanian town of Zarqa after the 1967 war. Recruited into the Muslim Brotherhood and briefly a fighter with Fatah, Azzam studied in Damascus, Amman, and then at the prestigious Al Azhar University in Cairo. His religious credentials were impeccable. At the start of the war in Afghanistan in 1980 he was teaching in Jidda, in Saudi Arabia, but, outraged by the Soviet invasion, he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, and began assisting the mujahedin.

Azzam became increasingly involved in the cause of the Afghan mujahedin, spending time in their camps along the Pakistani border and writing pamphlets urging Muslims from all over the Islamic world, especially his fellow Arabs, to join the jihad. In 1984, he wrote a book crucial to the expansion of jihad, The Defense of Muslim Territories, in which he argued that every Muslim had an obligation to join the Afghan struggle. Afghanistan was the place to defeat the unbeliever and enemies of Islam, Azzam emphasized, not only because the invaders posed the greatest threat to the ummah but also because the pay-off in defeating a superpower would be vastly increased stature for Muslims throughout the world.

Azzam even visited the United States in the 1980s to raise money for the cause. His book became as important to the Afghan jihad as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was to the American Revolution. Azzam followed it with dozens of articles and other books urging support for the jihad. Soon he broke with the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it too timid, and began spending all his time in Peshawar with the mujahedin or traveling around the ummah urging Muslims to join the jihad in South Asia.

To assist jihadis arriving from all points of the ummah, Azzam created the Maktab al Khadamat, or Service Bureau, in Peshawar, to provide them with housing and food. The cofounder of the Service Bureau was Osama Bin Laden, a fabulously rich young Saudi whom Azzam had met in Jidda. Bin Laden had come to Pakistan to join the jihad and brought with him financial support for an army of jihadi volunteers. Initially Azzam and Bin Laden set up hostels for jihadists in Peshawar, then they graduated to training camps where Arabs and others could “learn jihad” and go off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Azzam has rightly been called the father of the modern global jihad by a former chief of the Mossad. He was assassinated in 1989 in Peshawar just as the Soviets were leaving Afghanistan in defeat. By then Bin Laden was launched on his own career in jihad.

***

Both authors credit the George W. Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq with saving al-Qaida. Scheuer calls it “a godsend” for Bin Laden not just because it diverted American attention and resources away from finishing the job in south Asia but also because it validated Bin Laden’s claim to be “an acute analyst of American intentions.” Osama had been saying for years that America intended to invade the Arab Middle East to topple its governments, impose puppets, and force them to accept Israeli dominance. On February 11, 2003, Bin Laden sent a letter to the Iraqi people, broadcast via Al Jazeera, warning them to prepare for the “Crusaders war to occupy one of Islam’s former capitals, loot Muslim riches, and install a stooge regime to follow its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv to pave the way for the establishment of Greater Israel.” He advised the Iraqi nation to prepare for a long struggle against the Crusaders and in particular to engage in “urban and street warfare” and to “emphasize the importance of martyrdom operations which have inflicted unprecedented harm on America and Israel.” In Iraq all his predictions seemed to come true.

Al-Qaida also found a new hero in Iraq: another Jordanian citizen, also from Zarqa, named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayilah, better known as Abu Musaib Zarqawi. Zarqa is a tough, mean, and small working-class city close to Amman. It is a city of small industries and manufacturing with little charm. There is a large Palestinian population in the city and a very large Palestinian refugee camp nearby created after the 1967 war when tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians fled the Israeli occupation of their homes into Jordan. The camp is dirty, without adequate sewage or electricity. It is a place where extremism and fanaticism grow.

Zarqawi got in trouble with the law early in life. As with many other inmates in jail, Zarqawi became a more clever and dangerous criminal. He also found Islam and became a convert to extremist jihadism. He spent several years in prison before being released in a general amnesty in 1988. Upon his release, he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahedin in 1989. He arrived too late to fight the Soviets and instead witnessed the struggle between the various mujahedin factions for control of Kabul.

Zarqawi was a junior partner in an al-Qaida plot in December 2000 to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman, and he built his own jihadist training camp in Herat in Afghanistan, where he operated independently of al-Qaida but as a close complement to it. In 2002, he created an infrastructure in Iraq to prepare for the Americans. His network carried out its first operation by killing a USAID officer, Laurence Foley, in Amman on October 28, 2002.

As Bergen relates, Zarqawi then took Iraq to the brink of civil war. He sent dozens of suicide bombers to kill Americans and Iraqis alike and a couple to blow up the Radisson during a wedding celebration in Amman as well. Even the al-Qaida core hiding in Pakistan found him too violent, and his excesses ultimately did in the Iraqi al-Qaida as Iraqis rejected its wanton cruelty. But it kept America bogged down in Iraq long enough for the old core of al-Qaida to regenerate in Pakistan.

These are accounts of a war in progress, and so there is much we still don’t know about both Bin Laden and his organization. We know far too little, for example, about the dynamics of the relationship between Bin Laden and the self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful, Mullah Omar, to whom Bin Laden swears allegiance. Neither Scheuer nor Bergen speculate on what connections Bin Laden had at that time with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, which ran the mujahedin war. It is impossible to believe the ISI was not closely monitoring the rich Saudi’s activities in their back yard. This is an area that still cries out for more research and analysis by al-Qaida watchers. Nonetheless, these two books complement each other well and help us better understand our enemy, which is the first key to victory.

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The point is not the anti-Israel motivation in their actions. It is the anti-anything not Moslem motivation. This is something that people in the West don’t understand about the Jihadis. If you are a non-Moslem it doesn’t matter what you do or say they will always find a reason to hate you. Look at Gaza. Israel withdrew with no strings attached. Did Hamas use this as an opportunity for state building or bettering the lives of their people as someone with a Western outlook might do? No. They used it as a platform for launching thousands of missiles at Israel.
Wake up people and know your enemies.

fwsays:

January 27, 2011 - 9:49 am

Apart from being a frothing antisemite, Michael Scheuer actually went back and rewrote portions of his first book–changes incorporated in its later editions, to make him appear more prescient than he was. It is disappointing that his new book is actually being given a platform in Tablet.

Bob from Virginiasays:

January 27, 2011 - 10:20 am

If you want to understand bin Laden and company go to the Rubin Report and keep away from such “analysis” as provided here. Bin Laden hardly mentioned Palestine in his earlier works. If you want to understand the motivations of Al-Qaeda go to Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and stop ascribing logical motivations to emotional behavior. And the invasion of Iraq was heaven sent to those Arabs (and Kurds) who want democracy to come to the middle east, just as Obama has been a curse for freedom fighters everywhere. It is hard to see how it was a blessing for Al-Qaeda. True believers will always find a cause to kill and die for, whether Iraq, Palestine or indoor plumbing.

I am rather shocked that an internet magazine of Jewish interest offers a neutral review on what is clearly an anti-semitic and biased account of what this terrorist group allegedly stands for and I seriously doubt that these writer’s accounts are as neutral as your review. Where is your outrage? Would you be equally neutral if you reviewed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Do you seriously believe you are being “fair and tolerant” by letting these people air their propaganda as if they were scholarly papers by unbiased knowledgeable sources? The “know your enemy” absurdity is hardly a cover for letting these tracts be publicized especially in your publication. Indeed, your previous writer is spot on when he quotes Hoffer. Wake up guys. You are asking for tolerance of your mortal enemy.

MJ Rosenbergsays:

January 27, 2011 - 10:58 am

Scheuer not only hates Jews and Israel, he actually has advocated, on television no less, terror attacks on America. His primary passion in life seems to be despising Jews. Why then is his book on Bin Laden taken seriously? Next to Scheuer, Bin Ladn is King Hussein.

fwsays:

January 27, 2011 - 11:44 am

I would have to go back and check, but I believe that Scheuer advocated invading Iraq, went back and omitted that recommendation from his book, and blamed the subsequent invasion and its aftermath on American Jews. He also blames Jews for getting him fired from one of his professional positions.

fwsays:

January 27, 2011 - 11:55 am

Here’s a nice quote from Scheuer, courtesy of wikipedia:

In Marching Toward Hell, Scheuer laments “the war in Iraq that was instigated by U.S. citizen Israel-firsters and their evangelical Christian allies”.[30] He continues,
Because both U.S. political parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Israeli government, there is no large-scale U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in the cards… If you doubt this, keep in mind the name Rahm Emanuel. Slated to be the president-elect’s chief of staff, Mr. Emanuel has labored as a volunteer for AIPAC’s various anti-U.S. causes, strove to ensure the defeat of anti-Iraq War Democratic congressional candidates in 2006, and in 1991, as a 32-year-old U.S. citizen, chose to serve with the Israeli Defense Forces rather than volunteer to fight for the United States in the war against Saddam’s Iraq.[31]

I don’t get the argument. Bin Laden and other Arabs don’t like who America supports. So? Lots of other people don’t like American policies. China doesn’t like American support of Taiwan. North Korea doesn’t like American support of South Korea. Neither of these countries’ nationals tend to blow up civilians in the US or other Western Nations.

Scheuer misses the point. Terror cannot be allowed to dictate US foreign policy. You may as well not have a foreign policy. Also, if terror is fair game then it will become fair game for everyone against anyone. Under these circumstances safety and freedom will decrease worldwide (as they already have.)

Terrorism (defined as premeditated attacks on civilians to score psychological/media points against an enemy) is a disaster for everyone, including it’s originators. (Ask Iraqis, Afghanis, and Pakistanis what they think of the justification for suicide bombing.)

Frankly, Scheuer seems a bit dull. Perhaps that’s why Bin Laden is still running around, and Scheuer is retired and writing books. Hopefully, someone a bit sharper has replaced him at the CIA.

jacksays:

January 27, 2011 - 4:52 pm

What does Tablet have to say about the charges leveled at it by the commentators? I’ve been curious about Tablet’s agenda since it appeared.

arcaneonesays:

January 27, 2011 - 5:36 pm

In 1991, the US acceded to Saudi/Kuwaiti entreaties(not Zionist/neocon)and threw Saddam out of Kuwait.Bin Laden denounced SAudi Arabia for allowing the US to establish bases, making SA a “traitor” “puppet” regime in his eyes.

Not a word about these facts in this review. Not another “Mondoweiss” article I hope-designed to generate traffic rather than inform. Does the editor think the readers are idiots, or just not care as long as traffic is up?

dani levisays:

January 27, 2011 - 6:47 pm

I would encourage readers to view the youtube interview posted above by moi.
It is a fascinating hour with a very intelligent man. He is an academic and I sincerely doubt that he is an anti-semite. He breaks the topic down and clearly explains the dynamic. He also talks about the political and cultural failures in the US elite in recognizing the problem. The invasion of Iraq was and is a war crime in my mind. Bush really really screwed up. And the enemy profited greatly.
He goes on to say, and he is not alone, that the US will only wake up to the wider dynamic when the next terror attack on US soil happens. Killing tens of thousands or maybe an entire city.
The interesting thing is that the USA will have no one to bomb in return. Unless you wish to bomb the mountains in Pakistan or Yemen.
The man is not the only one who says the attack will come. Many people say this. But in US politics it would be suicide to engage that topic.
The US must rise to this challenge.

Gil F.says:

January 27, 2011 - 7:45 pm

It is easy to attack Scheuer. But what about Bergen? Tablet does a good job.
Reading the review and view the position of the reviewer it is a concern that it could be use to put Israel in the corner. However, there is a lot to do to understand and combat the agglomerate of de-legitimization that’s going on. View Israel policies it is difficult to not see that they have a easy task.

Rabbi Tony Jutnersays:

January 27, 2011 - 8:12 pm

These books graphically show why the creation of the zionist entity was a mistake. Other Jews, such as Daniel Levi of J Street feel similarly to me. NewJudaism, with its emphasis on Economic Justice, Social Justice, and Right of Return for Endogenous Peoples especially the Palestinians, is the only way that we can regain the moral high ground we held before 1948

pinchas from bostonsays:

January 28, 2011 - 12:22 am

A recent talkback at adamholland.blogspot made this astute comment on Michael Scheuer: in… the years he spent trying to learn to think like the enemy, he became attached with their message.

And I daresay Scheuer’s CIA colleague, Bruce Riedel, thinks similarly. His rather favorable review of Scheuer’s opus here in Tablet does not even mention, let alone criticize, Scheuer’s principal conclusion, which he swallowed whole from his “teacher” Osama bin Ladin, namely that the problem is Israel, i.e., the EXISTENCE of Israel.

In the spring 2010 issue of Middle East Policy, a Washington publication which is hyper-critical of Israel and Zionism and whose advisors include academics and former State Department folk like Chas Freeman, Jr., John Esposito, Richard Falk, and Ian Lustick, Riedel said with emphasis the following: The Arab-Israeli conflict has become a threat to the national security interests of the United States of America.

Sounds innocuous, indeed valid, no? But if you go a step further– as Scheuer and Riedel’s colleagues at MEP have actually done– the problem is not the Arab-Israeli conflict but the American-Israeli alliance. Detach from that, these Arabists who have “gone native” say more and more openly, and voila, you’ve solved the problem!

That Tablet has allowed Riedel to get his foot in the door of a Jewish publication with a positive review of Scheuer’s anti-semitic obsession with Jews and Israel and with his own reductionist thinking which lends itself to subtlely legitimize Israel’s delegitimization raises the question other talkbackers have raised, which side is Tablet on? And if it says, we’re non-partisan, we’re neutral, I’ll remind Tablet that, in the words of Howard Zinn (definitely no hero of mine), you can’t be neutral on a moving train…

robert kernsays:

January 28, 2011 - 3:49 am

it does not matter what the reason or logic is- the enemy only believed they, could take us on – when we pulled out of somalia

arcaneonesays:

January 28, 2011 - 5:26 am

DANI LEVI-I listened to the Scheuer interview, and he did not even mention Israel until prompted by the moderator about a third of the way thru the interview. He did however cite other Muslim grievances against us, namely bases in Saudi Arabia(as I said), and our support for Muslim police states(which we did not create). He also mentioned the weakness conferred by our lack of energy policy, and by our failed immigration policies. Israel hardly figured in his analysis at all, to the extent that the interviewer stated that Scheuer was coming across as much more moderate than his book. He also seems to have missed the democratic surge now beginning to sweep the Arab world, a surge that so far is largely secular. The Muslim extreme resentment against us is largely that of a group habituated to blaming the “other” for its problems and to shirking its own responsibility.

Stevesays:

January 28, 2011 - 11:06 am

Peter Bergen in his book repeatedly refers to the “cease-fire” between Egypt and Israel (and the subsequent assassination of Sadat for signing it). He never refers to it as it is (a peace treaty). By labeling it as a cease-fire his conclusion is obvious; that it can easily be broken at any time. Bergen is very similar to Scheuer in conveniently blaming all the problems on Israel and her supporters,

arcaneonesays:

January 30, 2011 - 1:12 am

Rabbi Tony Jutner–Your J-Street “New Judaism” will bring disaster on us all. Do you really want to go back to the days of third-class victimhood, utterly dependent on the nonexistent compassion of democrats and dictators alike? That era wasn’t so long ago that it should be forgotten already. Our “moral high ground before 1948″ was strewn with our corpses.

Freedom House just named Israel as the only Mideast country in the “free” category. What is “progressive” about “progressives” destroying what is, for all its flaws, the only successful society in the Mideast? Do you and J(erk)Street prefer Saudi Arabia? Iran? Syria? Sudan? The Palestinian Authority, headed by a man who got a doctorate in Holocaust denial? Are Sunnis and Shiites chronically at sword’s point because of Israel? Are most Muslim countries either police states or outright failures because of Israel, or is something else involved? You are an utter ninny. Dhimmi.

arcaneonesays:

January 30, 2011 - 4:06 am

dani levi

“…about the political and cultural failures in the US elite in recognizing the problem. The invasion of Iraq was and is a war crime in my mind. Bush really really screwed up. And the enemy profited greatly…”

In your general comments, I tend to agree with you. Not here. No less a personage than Hans Blix has stated that he did not think Bush(for whom I did not vote)deliberately lied about Saddam’s WMD. Blix called on Bush to allow him 3 more months of investigation, but, aside from not finding any WMD, what would that have proved? One major drawback is that a3-month delay would have pushed an invasion back into the Iraqi hot season–much harder on our soldiers and equipment.

Think back to 2003. Massive smuggling, with no way to tell what was coming into Iraq.Massive corruption in the oil-for-food program, with the UN and some of our closest allies thoroughly complicit. Massive suffering in Iraq, for which the US was being blamed. The steady erosion of the sanctions regime, and the likelihood that Saddam would have rebuilt his WMD program. Saddam’s gaming of world oil markets thru bribing suicide bombers.

That is a fair representation of the situation on the verge of war in 2003. If not by war and regime change, how would YOU have resolved those vital issues?

dani levisays:

January 30, 2011 - 3:41 pm

Saddam is not important. Iraq was a mistake and therefore a waste of time. Iraq was on its knees because of the sanctions. That’s why the war was over in a few weeks. I sincerely doubt it was a credible threat at that time. i think many in Israel would agree with this.

Iran is the one that should have been hit. And I’ll bet a case of the best Galilee wine that Iran will either get whacked within five years, or Western Intelligence services will work towards a economical/social collapse. They are at it already. The sanctions are biting. As things get more desperate Tehran will make more mistakes. Tehran will overstretch, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan. Petrol will become scarce, international banking is drying up. The mercantile class will get restless, it will push the Islamofascists against the moderates. Millions of unemployed need work and money, there is massive corruption. The Revolutionary Guard will look after its own and will further antagonize the public.
All we need to do is open a bottle of wine, sit back and watch the country go down the drain.
Heaven.

arcaneonesays:

February 1, 2011 - 4:44 am

DANI LEVI

Think back to 2003. Massive smuggling, with no way to tell what was coming into Iraq.Massive corruption in the oil-for-food program, with the UN and some of our closest allies thoroughly complicit. Massive suffering in Iraq, for which the US was being blamed. The steady erosion of the sanctions regime, and the likelihood that Saddam would have rebuilt his WMD program. Saddam’s gaming of world oil markets thru bribing suicide bombers.

That is a fair representation of the situation on the verge of war in 2003. If not by war and regime change, how would YOU have resolved those vital issues?
****************

So just for the heck of it, what would you have done? I have asked this question in numerous forums, and NO ONE has ever answered directly, and, if I mmay hazard a guess, no one ever will.

arcaneonesays:

February 1, 2011 - 8:04 am

The War Presidents
By JAMES TRAUB
Published: January 28, 2011

o

One of the chief roles of the philosopher, from the time of Socrates, has been to discomfit citizens by forcing them to think about matters from which they would prefer to avert their eyes. Stephen L. Carter, a professor of law at Yale as well as a successful novelist, has written a book about “just war” theory in which he concludes that Barack Obama, a president he clearly admires, has prosecuted the war on terror with no more regard for the theory’s ancient principles than George W. Bush (whom many of Carter’s readers no doubt consider a war criminal). The really discomfiting part is that Carter doesn’t advance this claim as a criticism, but rather as an acknowledgment of the way America’s leaders fight wars, and are quite likely to continue fighting this one.

THE VIOLENCE OF PEACE

America’s Wars in the Age of Obama

By Stephen L. Carter

255 pp. Beast Books. $24.99.

Carter notes that Obama, who formerly taught constitutional law, has been quite explicit on the subject of just wars. He subjects Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize address to close scrutiny, citing a passage that declared a state may engage in warfare only “if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.” But a president who lays out such lofty standards is then liable to claims of hypocrisy if his actions belie his principles.

Carter observes that while Obama has issued an executive order banning torture, he has continued the tactic known as rendition, which allows American forces to seize designated enemy combatants and move them to other countries for interrogation. Obama’s executive order mandates that the treatment of those detainees be monitored, but many of the countries in question routinely tort

arcaneonesays:

February 1, 2011 - 8:09 am

cont.

THE VIOLENCE OF PEACE

America’s Wars in the Age of Obama

By Stephen L. Carter

255 pp. Beast Books. $24.99.

Carter notes that Obama, who formerly taught constitutional law, has been quite explicit on the subject of just wars. He subjects Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize address to close scrutiny, citing a passage that declared a state may engage in warfare only “if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.” But a president who lays out such lofty standards is then liable to claims of hypocrisy if his actions belie his principles.

Carter observes that while Obama has issued an executive order banning torture, he has continued the tactic known as rendition, which allows American forces to seize designated enemy combatants and move them to other countries for interrogation. Obama’s executive order mandates that the treatment of those detainees be monitored, but many of the countries in question routinely torture prisoners. The net effect, Carter concludes, is that the Obama administration has continued the use of coercive interrogation, but that “American hands will no longer be dirtied.”

Carter observes that the Bush administration coined the term “unlawful combatant” to place America’s new adversaries beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions.

Can we accept this as a morally and legally meaningful distinction? Carter points out that in his Nobel speech, Obama argued that America cannot “insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves.” But, Carter writes, “the president’s actions do not bear this out.” The Obama administration has arrogated to itself the right to engage in a whole range of actions it would deem unacceptable if used by our adversaries.

arcaneonesays:

February 1, 2011 - 8:16 am

cont.

Carter accepts, if uneasily, the principle that one cannot fight a rule-observing war against an adversary who disdains the rules. And so he does not call on the president to repudiate his choices, but rather to own up to them publicly. His own sensibility is tragic. Indeed, Carter seems almost too attracted to the tragic recognition that war forces intolerable choices, that things look different from the inside than from the outside, that presidents do what they think they must. His understanding makes him resist all easy judgment. But don’t we need to say firmly that it is precisely because the war on terror offers so strong a temptation to torture that the temptation must be resisted?

At times, in fact, Carter goes to excessive lengths to collapse the moral distinction between the Bush and Obama approach to war.
Yet isn’t the real point that the distinction between “war of necessity” and “war of choice” is overdrawn; that blurring the distinction between them, as Obama has done, is a strictly academic infraction; and that what really matters is deciding when one does and does not need to fight? And if that’s so, then should we not bitterly regret that it was George Bush, and not someone else — say, Al Gore — who was president at the time of the terrorist attacks?

Carter has positioned himself at a very unusual place: the intersection between the high ideals of Christian and secular moral philosophy and the exigencies of a very grim war. Most of us would rather ignore both the pull of those ideals and the ugly reality of that war. We want satisfying answers. Carter has no such answers to offer — only difficult questions which, once posed, can no longer be ignored.

Why is it that before Israel came into existence, the USA had NO ME enemies, but now ww have many, and all of them ‘existential’ enemies of Israel that they want their colony, the USA to destroy.

None of this hatred from Israeli-Firsters and our traitorous Congress would be possible w/o the 9/11 FALSE FLAG/INSIDE JOB pulled off by elements of the FBI; the CIA and Pentagon, the White House and ISRAEL.

Remember those five dancing Jews, caught filming the WTC attacks from a New Jersey park?

They were laughing, hi-fiving each other and having so much fun watching nearly 3,000 of us GOYIM die that someone reported them to the police and they were caught and pulled over.
Inside the van, the police found BOX CUTTERS, a large amount of cash and their bomb sniffing dog detected traces of explosives.

They were held for a short period, before Alan Dershowitz and the slimy Chuck Schumer intervened and they got sent back to their FATHERLAND, Apartheid Israel.

And how Benny Netanyahu said the WTC attacks was very good for Israel? What kind of ‘friend’ gloats about mass murder?

Israel is an out of control mad dog and the cause of many false flag terror attacks around the world, which their Zionist MSM blames on jihadists, in order to keep Americans PO’d and more than happy to sacrifice our sons and daughters and spend ourselves into oblivion fighting these ‘Wars for Wall Street and Israel.’

We need to take back control of our foreign policy and stop sending those monthly welfare checks to Israel; that money is needed in the USA to rebuild our shattered economy.

So Israel, keep making up lies so you can bomb the hell out of Gaza and Lebanon, but do it without our help.

Beatrixsays:

June 27, 2011 - 12:12 pm

Hey Greg, did you use the name Bacon because you thought that would be amusing on a Jewish website, or are you telling us that you’re fat and greasy?

Were you hiding under the bed after the 9/11 attack? Perhaps that’s why you don’t know there weren’t Jewish dancers across the street. The area was covered with smoke, soot, grime, fire and sirens. Everyone was running for his life. No one was dancing. Nor were the police free to arrest dancers; the police who survived were helping other survivors to escape the destruction.

We didn’t have problems in the Mideast before the establishment of Israel, because most of the Mideast was under colonialist control. The countries that weren’t sided with Hitler. He helped to cause 40 million deaths, including 6 million Jews, and there was no Israel to blame. And damn few Jews left in Europe to blame, either.

The Mideastern nations hated Israel because she was established by the former colonists and they thought she was going to be a colonist, too. The Mideast hates the West and hates Israel because they consider her Western, too.

Why would OBL attack America if his target was Israel? Who attacks a major power when their target is a teeny, tiny country?

These antisemites are little people who need little targets because they’re afraid of the big, bad world, Small groups like the Jews and small countries like Israel are much easier for them to manage. Even then they have to come out from under their rocks to write articles like this one or letters like bacon’s or books like scheuer’s and bergen’s.

Beatrixsays:

June 27, 2011 - 1:39 pm

Carter, Bush, Gore and Obama were or are weak leaders. Carter and Bush had strong advisers such as Kissinger, Brzezinski, Rove and Cheney. Obama wants to do it all himself. Gore would have been a disaster, a sixties style hero in a 21st century world.

Bush was told by the CIA, England and Italy’s spy agencies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Given this information, his actions were understandable.

The 20th century didn’t start until 1914, the beginning of WW1, and so we had time to prepare for it. Bush’s problem was that the 21st century started 9/11/01, and we were unprepared. Bush used 20th century methods to fight back.

The 21st century isn’t going to have huge world wars, and giant oppressive political system such as Nazism or Communism. But so far, America doesn’t have the great leadership we need to face a brand new century.

I’ve said that least 937851 times. The problem this like that is they are just too compilcated for the average bird, if you know what I mean

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